Wordsworth and Blake: The Plight of Mankind Anonymous

William Wordsworth and William Blake were both distraught by the plight of man in the early nineteenth century. Their separate but somewhat unified visions of man's problems are displayed in their poems "Lines Written in Early Spring," (lines 5-24) and "London," respectively. They both make use of several poetic devices in very different manners to convey nearly the same meaning. Each poet uses the mood of his poem to show how deep in strife man truly is, though the tone of each poem vastly contrasts with the other. Both Blake and Wordsworth also link man to another entity, and each also use meter and rhyme scheme to show the same. Stylistically, the poems are extremely dissimilar, and the contents of each are tremendously unalike, but ultimately, they both point out the same issues with which man is dealing.

Wordsworth's "Lines" sets the tone immediately by setting the reader in a pleasant situation and using peaceful imagery. The reader is brought to a grove in which the writer is observing Nature; the birds "hopped and played" (13), which "seemed a thrill of pleasure" (16), and "The budding twigs spread out their fan/To catch the breezy air" (17). He works at...